Uptown Glamour Goes Downtown in a Bold and Witty West Village Pad
Jonathan and Lizzie Tisch don’t do anything halfway. When the Manhattan couple-about-town decided to buy a downtown apartment as the weekend complement to their uptown residence, the do-it-right-or-don’t-do-it-at-all duo immediately got down to business. Their first goal: Make it feel different. “Uptown, we’re in a prewar building with these crazy proportional rooms-the space is beautiful, very grand, and designed to within an inch of its life,” says Lizzie. “Downtown, I wanted it to be more loft-like.”
The A-list couple enlisted the help of their longtime design team, Timothy Haynes and Kevin Roberts, who previously worked on their uptown apartment and their residences in Palm Beach and Bridgehampton (all three of which were featured in Elle Decor).
“They’re perfectionists, and they love the process,” Roberts says. It doesn’t hurt that Jon, as he’s known to friends, and Lizzie are design aficionados. He is the chairman and CEO of Loews Hotels, and she is a fashion lover of the highest degree. Recently, she launched a business, LTD by Lizzie Tisch, that sells exclusive, limited-edition items from designers and artists such as Lingua Franca and Ashley Longshore. Together, they are also major supporters of the arts: When New York’s massive new nonprofit cultural venue the Shed opens this spring, it will feature two areas-the Lizzie and Jonathan Tisch Skylights event space and the Tisch Lab-generously underwritten by the couple.
Their design radar is always switched on. “Lizzie is constantly coming in and saying, ‘Look at this jewelry I saw in Paris, or this coat I spotted on the runway,’ ” Haynes says. “Or Jon will stay at a hotel in London and notice a material used there that he plans to use at the Loews.”
For this project, a 3,100-square-foot penthouse in Greenwich Village, Lizzie, who is known for her colorful wardrobe, gravitated toward primary hues. A lipstick red–lacquer mirror and matching stools greet visitors in the entry. In the living room, a 1960s Robert Haussmann sofa gleams in its sapphire silk velvet by Ralph Lauren Home. Over it hangs a favorite acquisition chosen by these avid contemporary art collectors: Ricci Albenda’s twin paintings Two Wrongs Don’t Make a Right.
Throughout the airy lair, uptown luxury rubs shoulders with downtown flair. And there are touches of humor, from Dave Muller’s artwork resembling a Led Zeppelin record (which hangs over a Harvey Probber sectional) to the master bedroom’s black, silver, and frosted sconces that look more like balloons than light fixtures.
“Every piece in their home is interesting and funny,” says their friend, TV personality Kelly Ripa. “But at the same time, it also feels relaxed. I’ve never once walked into their apartment and caught my breath thinking, Oh, no. What if I accidentally spill something on the floor?”
A downtown perch is definitely something new for Jon, who grew up on the Upper East Side, where he lived as a child inside his family’s Loews Regency hotel (friends have joked that he is the “male Eloise”). But it is growing on him. “Our two New York City residences may be just 50 blocks apart, but they are very much two different worlds, and that is one of the features that we find so compelling,” he says.
If uptown is a place to focus on work, then downtown is where the couple spend their time relaxing and exploring new neighborhoods. “We feel like we got on a plane and traveled for the weekend,” he says. It’s less exotic, perhaps, for Lizzie, who lived in Greenwich Village after graduating from college. For her, having an apartment downtown feels like a homecoming, but better. “I don’t bump into 15 people I know, like I do uptown,” she says. “There’s something kind of nice about being a little bit of a stranger in your own city.”
This story originally appeared in the March 2019 issue of ELLE Decor.
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